The article and some other comments here honestly just made me nostalgic for the first Apple computer I owned, an early generation "unibody" cast aluminum MacBo

The article and some other comments here honestly just made me nostalgic for the first Apple computer I owned, an early generation "unibody" cast aluminum MacBook Pro. It was, bar none, the easiest modern laptop to open up and service I've ever worked on, and I did that professionally for several years. Simple screws, minimal variation in screw size, solid steel parts, no silly plastic tabs, and nothing that felt like "this didn't need to be taped in, but using tape/glue/whatever sure makes it easy for official warranty support people to tell if you've been tinkering around in there." Replacing entire logic boards, or doing even trickier work like re-cementing CPU heatsinks, was incredibly easy and intuitive even without a manual (which was fortunate, since the official maintenance/manual documentation was pretty expensive to get access to legally). Apple gets a lot of crap for the declining serviceability of their laptops, but remember that it wasn't always this way. Things have gotten way worse, and for pretty transparently dumb reasons. The "tamper-proof" screws were the stick that broke the camel's back for me; I was willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt regarding hyper-restrictive hardware compatibility checks and proprietary connectors, but when they made the physical tooling itself pointlessly expensive/difficult to get (torx was already a widespread standard; why give pentalobe, already a bastard stepchild, more market share?), I started being a lot more suspicious. Where were the people surreptitiously opening up laptops and stealing RAM? Or installing hardware keyloggers? Instead, "tamperer" turned out to be basically the same as "hobbyist", "non-blessed repairman", or "curious kid who wants to know what the inside of their computer looks like". And the party line I've heard from colleagues who work for Apple is inane: "it damages the reliability of the brand to let anyone poke around inside; they can break stuff!" Any hobbyist, aspiring geek, or unsanctioned technician knows what they're getting into. Anyone in those groups, or anyone handing their computer over to such a person, isn't going to blame Apple when tinkering/inspection causes issues (if they do, they'll be laughed at by anyone who hears them). Either it was broken and the maintenance/tinkering fixed it, it wasn't broken and it was after being opened up, or it was broken and remained that way. Sigh. End rant. I miss the good old days, I guess. Snow Leopard and hardware that was elegant, simple, and easy to fix and use. I'll go back to working on my lawn now, so I can tell kids to get off of it. Monsanto considers it an illegal modification and TOS violation to water the MiracleGrass I planted, so now it's all dead and I have to seed it again.